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SHOOTDOWNS, CYPHERS AND SPENDING 225
was unthinkable to the authorities. Accordingly, it was only in
1967 that Wright finally secured permission to interview him
at Princeton. 94 To his obvious discomfiture Hampshire was interviewed
a second time in 1970, but eventually Sir Dick White,
the distinguished head of SIS, concluded that the accusations
against him were false. White was almost certainly correct.
Although superficially left-wing, Hampshire was fundamentally
conservative and a great believer in British institutions. Indeed,
his most famous philosophical work, on Spinoza and the nature
of free will, implicitly rejected Marxist determinism.
Nevertheless, had his past friendships been known in 1962, it
is unlikely that he would have been selected to review GCHQ. 95
Later, when these issues were revealed to the public,
Hampshire complained about the 'hypocritical and slimy
McCarthyism of the press'. His wartime MIS colleague Herbert
Hart, also the subject of suspicion, hit out at the popular obsession
with 'spy pornography'. The two men were representative
of a wide circle of people, most of them honest toilers in the
vineyards of intelligence, who had worked alongside Anthony
Blunt, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby during the war, and now
felt distinctly uncomfortable. The end of the Macmillan era and
the arrival of Harold Wilson as Prime Minister in 1964 signalled
a change of climate. GCHQ was moving from an era of tightlipped
secrecy towards a period of revelations and further spy
scandals. Turbulent waters lay ahead. 96